From the Heart of the Vortex!

Today, we're clearing out a bunch of quick and easy answers! Blog attack, go!

Question: Would you use Larceny or Art/Science: Computer/Hacking for hacking?

Art (Computer), or, if you happen to have the Polymath boon, it would fall under Art (Modern). It's too specialized a skill to be done with plain old Larceny.

Question: Do improvements to relics always have to come from a crafter god, or can certain relics gain power through mythical events like their Scion owners gaining legend? For example, if a Scion defeated a powerful monster and gained a Legend dot, would her magic axe gain new abilities?

Relic improvements always need to come from Artistry within the game itself; you won't spontaneously gain new relic points from things you do, because that would be overpowered and difficult for a Storyteller to adjudicate (not to mention making people with Artistry have a purview that was way less useful). However, you gain new Birthright points when you become a Demigod and when you become a God, so you could have relics spontaneously gain dots at those jumps if you wanted to.

Question: Why doesn't Ra have Animal (Scarab)?

Because it's really Khepri, the scarab god, who has that association. Ra was syncretized with Khepri sometimes, where the beetle god was seen as Ra's aspect as the rising sun, but if we gave Ra associations for everyone he was ever syncretized with, he'd be Voltron.

Question: According to your posts, Hecate is still a titan (or at least very, very titanic). Does this mean she can't sire scions, or is she goddess enough to do so? Do her hypothetical kids have any side effects (showing up when scenting the titanic, gaining dark virtues etc) or are they just normal scions who might have to put up with some prejudice due to their heritage?

Hecate is a goddess for purposes of our games, and creates Scions normally as part of the Theoi. She is of Titanic lineage and occasionally called such in Greek mythology, but she's the same generation as Zeus' children and had a strong cult worship that made her close enough to humanity to be considered a god.

Question: What do Pakiy, Emamu and Stvaranje mean?

Etymological roots for all the Titanrealms can be found in this old post.

Question: Aura of Dread doesn't specify that it's only for Scions with Negative Epic Appearance, yet it is clearly the starting point for the Negative Knacks. Since it doesn't say "Negative only" does that mean an attractive Scion can still take that Knack? If I wanted my good-looking warrior Scion to still project a terrifying image on the battlefield, would that work?

No. Aura of Dread, like all the other knacks in the terrorizing tree, us usable by negative Epic Appearance only. It should say that, so we'll fix it, but it should also be pretty obvious, y'all.

Question: Are the Avatars going to get worked over with the boon revamp? Or is that a separate project?

It's a separate project, but one that we hope to work on soon, and we're talking about basic ideas for it while we work on the APP project.

Question: I was looking for how Sanctums worked, and found that your post from April 1, 2012 that said you were working on definite rules. Is that something thats progressing without a bar? has the project been demolished? up for vote? finished but not released?

It isn't being worked on at this particular moment, but we could certainly add it to the voting block if it's something you guys would like to happen sooner rather than later!

Question: Creatures are always lower legend than the scion. Does this also apply to Nahualli? I mean, they're YOU?

No. Nahualli are not Creature Birthrights and are not bound by that rule. They are a unique kind of Birthright all their own.

Question: Hello! If a Scion has a child as a Hero or Demigod, I know that the ichor would still flow from the grandparent and the grandparent will be able to activate the child, but what happens if the Demigod becomes a god - could they THEN activate their own child?

Yep, sure can.

Question: I was looking at your Perceptive Capacity table. Does it mean that the furthest any mortal can see is 12 yards (5 on the table)? That seems a little harsh to me, am I misunderstanding the rules?

You are, but that's okay, we explain it in this old post back here.

Question: Do the Aztecs have a legendary smith like Vølund or Hephaestus?

They do not; most of their armor and weapons were made of non-metal materials like obsidian and stiffened paper or cloth. They had artisans that performed goldsmithing (mostly for jewelry and ritual objects) and occasionally traded with their neighbors for bronze, but it wasn't an important enough style of crafting to merit its own deity.

Question: Do Fatebonds get the XP discount if the player has the appropriate Me PSP associated with a purview?

Yes, both the player and their Fatebonds get to buy (or unbuy) that purview at the lower rate thanks to Me.

Question: Do Empath auto-successes apply to Manipulation + Empathy rolls for lying?

Yes, they apply to anything that you roll Empathy for.

And that'll be it for now! Don't worry, we won't be doing a lot of these (we prefer the big in-depth posts!), but since the questionado has grown to a current maelstrom of 203, we figured we'd get a few of the quick ones out of the way.

Back into the fray!

Star of the Dark Blue Earth

Question: Your Incan supplement says that the only being that could non-violently deal with Perses is Hecate, his daughter, but what about his wife Asteria? Could she do the same, or does the story of her becoming the island of Ortygia mean that she's no longer among the living?

That's up to interpretation, so go wild! Asteria is definitely "out of play" for the Dodekatheon for most of their run, having turned into Ortygia/Delos and done nothing further other than pissing Hera off by aiding Leto to have her children, but in Scion's setting there are several possibilities for what actually happened to her. Being a Titan, it's unlikely that she's actually dead, since that tends to cause terrible repercussions for the World and we know of no star- or prophecy-related disaster that would match up to her demise, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily just loose on the World right now.

It's possible that the story of Asteria's transformation is a metaphor for her being consigned to Tartarus; while she didn't fight in the Titanomachy and seems to have been an accepted inhabitant of Olympus after the Titans were defeated, her defiance of Zeus and refusal to be his lover might have motivated him to chuck her in jail with her parents anyway. Hyginus, in particular, spins the story so that after Asteria had turned herself into a quail to escape, it was Zeus in his fury who threw her into the ocean to become an island. Ovid adds that Zeus turned himself into his eagle form to do so, making it a bird of prey pursuing a hapless little avian. In this case, Asteria could very well be out and about after the sundering of Tartarus, and just as available to interact with anyone you like as any other previously-locked-up Titan.

On the other hand, perhaps she really is the island of Delos, which still exists in the Mediterranean as well as in ancient myth (John and I wanted to go there when we were in Greece, but unfortunately it turns out you can't see an entire country in ten days). While normally a Titan couldn't turn into a landmark like that without being removed from the World by concerned gods or causing massive continuing problems from her Fateful Aura, a purview Avatar (or several in concert) could have actually turned her to unliving rock, dormant enough to never wake again. In some versions of the story, she turned into a quail to escape Zeus and was then forced to turn into an island when, upon running into the ocean, Poseidon started chasing her instead; she might have fully given up in favor of not living with these assholes anymore (like Cavillaca, who you'll also find in the Inca supplement). A few fringe versions also claim that the island transformation was performed by Zeus, Poseidon or other gods as a punishment, and it's not hard to imagine it might be a result of Poseidon's The Shaper combined with Zeus' The Arbiter or something similar. That leaves you a lot of interesting possibilities for a game: is Asteria actually dead and gone for good, and if so, did this transformation get around the usual rule against destroying Titans, or is it perhaps delayed in some way, about to happen if the island of Delos itself is ever destroyed? Is she still alive but trapped in some Terra Incognita that is only accessible from the sacred island, perhaps unknown to all except those who put her there (or to everyone, because only she knows she retreated there)? Is she the island itself, actually a living thing that somehow doesn't cause the normal consequences of a Fateful Aura, perhaps through her own use of The Wyrd in her extremity or something that other Fate goddesses such as the Fates or her daughter Hecate are doing? Now that the Titans have escaped, can she interact with or help her old cronies in Tamoanchan, or is she cut off from everyone?

If you do decide that Asteria is alive and well and capable of talking to people, then she certainly might be able to attempt to approach Perses, who at least didn't murder her while they were married and could be assumed to be fond of her. The two haven't seen one another for millennia, of course, so it might be a rocky reunion, and Perses is likely to go even more bananas with Vengeance if he finds out about the Olympians' treatment of his wife after he was imprisoned, but it's possible she could calm him down enough to at least have a conversation. Unless he thinks she betrayed him by not helping in the Titanomachy, in which case all bets are off. Greek relationships are complicated and dangerous things.

It would also be interesting to see what Hecate and Asteria might do if reunited; Hecate works for the Dodekatheon, but she's still more Titan than god and always has been, and herself and her mother, both brimming with Fate powers and Vengeance, might make life very uncomfortable indeed for the gods who have mistreated them.

Psychopomp Sentiment

Question: I've recently come across a number of websites that claim that Hermes and Hecate were in some sort of relationship. Most of them have a distant Wiccan bent to them, and I was wondering if you could tell me whether the Greeks of antiquity had any mythic or cult beliefs that would corroborate this relationship, since it strikes me as very interesting.

For the most part, no, there's no context for an ancient Greek belief in Hermes and Hecate having any kind of relationship. However, there are a lot of reasons why it's a popular idea!

Hermes and Hecate are figures with a great deal in common: they're both gods of crossroads, psychopomps who guide souls in and out of the Underworld, connected intimately to the death gods of the pantheon and renowned for their prowess as magicians. Both of them appear performing the same functions in myths, most obviously when they are both involved in the myth of the kidnapping of Persephone, wherein Hecate accompanies and guides her in the Underworld and Hermes does so when retrieving her from it. It's not surprising that they're occasionally invoked together, usually in requests for both to watch over the fortune of livestock or calls to guide the souls of the recently departed - they do a lot of the same jobs, and two gods helping you out is usually better than one, right?

However, there are no myths in which they have a romantic relationship. In fact, there are no myths in which they actually talk to one another at all; they may both sometimes act as messengers, but apparently never to each other. Despite their similar roles, they also have no shared cult centers that we're aware of, nor worship practices that tie them together. Hecate and Hermes are close in concept, but they're not actually close as in ever having lunch together.

The idea that Hermes and Hecate are lovers is probably drawn from a single source: the Eleusinian Mysteries, which, just like their cousins the Orphic Mysteries, are prone to bizarre changes to mainstream Greek religion to suit their patron gods. According to Pausanias, Hermes had a fling with Daeira, an Oceanid and minor goddess of the Underworld, from which was born the eponymous Eleusinian hero Eleusis (for those who've been following the vlog, we talked about his son and Demeter's attempt to grant him immortality a while ago!). Daeira is otherwise unattested in Greek mythology, and her parentage as a daughter of Oceanus suggests she isn't particularly connected to Hecate, but some scholars nevertheless believe that it might be an alternative name of the witch-goddess. An even more obscure possibility is mentioned in Propertius' early Roman Elegies, in which he claims that another underworld goddess, Brimo, slept with Mercury; again, some scholars believe that Brimo might be an alternative name for Hecate, although such is never explicitly stated.

Of course, these possibilities are speculation, and both Daeira and Brimo are also theorized to be code names for Persephone, Demeter, the Furies, or actually simply lesser underworld goddesses in their own right, much like Hermes' other consorts who are usually nymphs or minor goddesses. If you're totally in love with the idea of there being some kind of psychopomp hanky-panky happening in the background, you could definitely pursue the mystery cult connection, but you're also more than justified in ignoring the very slim evidence. For the most part, the popular notion in Wicca of the two gods being consorts is based on their similar mythological functions rather than any actual historical connection.

Anything but Trivial

Question: Why does Hecate have Epic Wits associated?

Alas, normally these are easy questions to answer - I can be like, "Look at this myth, and this other myth, BAM! That's why that person has that stat!" Such is not the case with Hecate, unfortunately, and the reasoning is a combination of system restrictions and the general enigmatic nature of Hecate's mythology.

As far as the system goes, we strive to always make sure that every playable parent god has at least one Attribute and one purview associated; while we're fine with not every god having the same number of associations, we do prefer to keep any Scions from having absolutely no options for an XP discount in either dimension. Hecate has plenty of demonstrable associations for purviews; in fact, contrary to our usual problems with Dodekatheon gods, we actually had to keep her trimmed down to the strongest of all her burgeoning possibilities instead of having to reach to give her some. But for Attributes, there was no single one that really jumped out and made itself known, which presented us with a conundrum.

And it's not that Hecate doesn't do things that look like uses of Attributes; it's rather that she does many things that look like uses of Attributes, and that they aren't consistent or repeated. Zeus appears to love her an alarming amount, making her not only one of the only Titans allowed to hang out on Olympus but declaring that, of all Titans, only she gets to keep her ancient properties in the universe (including part of his domain, the sky!) - so that might be some pretty hefty Charisma there, but she doesn't really do it again beyond that example. Along with all-seeing Helios, she's the only other god in creation who notices Persephone's abduction by Hades, a dude renowned for his sneaking abilities - so that looks like a good argument for Perception, but again this is the only time she demonstrates it. Her involvement in helping Demeter find Persephone, helping Persephone escape but also possibly being the instrument of Persephone's inescapable connection to Hades might indicate some Manipulation at work - but does it really, when with Manipulation it's so hard to tell if she manipulated unless someone caught her doing it? And she kills another Titan with fire that one time, so is there something there we should be paying attention to?

So while Hecate is definitely doing lots of things that would normally be worthy of Attribute, well, attribution, she never does the same thing twice in a row. That's a little bit frustrating, and we don't want to just give her all of the things she demonstrates, since that'd be gilding the lily quite a bit and we would require more demonstration of those qualities before we gave them to any other god. So we were kind of stuck, and we ended up doing something we hate but always seem to end up having to do for the Dodekatheon: we compromised.

Hecate eventually ended up with Epic Wits associated because it was the Attribute that made the most sense to us as a catch-all that might be able to cover all the stuff she does. Between knowing which side of the Titanomachy her bread was buttered on and demonstrating all kinds of things that most other gods would have to specialize to be able to do, we came to the conclusion that Epic Wits was the best choice to represent her magical ability to always be in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, even if it wasn't something she was normally famous for. It's not a traditional interpretation of Epic Wits the way most of our associations are - she's not a career trickster or a famous weaseler-out-of-troubler, but she is a figure who is never without the perfect skill for the occasion and who somehow managed to keep her property, prestige and influences despite being a Titan and existing alongside other deities who by rights should have easily replaced her and rendered her irrelevant but somehow failed to do so.

There are a lot of Attributes she could have, but the only one we could really make a strong case for was Epic Wits; the lady is one of the most savvy survivors and responders of her insane pantheon, and she does it so well almost nobody seems to notice.